KAI CASEY ↑ Todd Cross, campus landscape manager, tends a sapling in the campus nursery. He leads a team of self-described “plant lunatic nerds” working to keep the campus beautiful for generations to come. Scan this QR code or go to campusarb .oregonstate.edu to support the arboretum, request a tour, see a map or learn more. Fall 2026 41 WHEN STACY ALLISON came to Oregon State in 1976, it was with the intention of becoming a nutritionist. Quickly, this ambition was derailed. She lived with a few avid rock climbers, and under cover of darkness, she joined them in climbing Pseudotsuga menziesii, Douglas-firs, on campus. She practiced rappelling techniques, using only ropes and slings. “We did it at night,” she told me, “when we wouldn’t get caught. I wasn’t the only one; we were not very good rule-followers.” When she joined a climber friend on a trip to Zion National Park, she became hooked. In 1978, Allison left Oregon State, in part to pursue climbing and mountaineering. In 1988, she became the first American woman to summit Mount Everest. The Douglas-fir where she learned to rappel is now gone, but based on the evidence of visitors in the upper reaches of the sequoias on campus, the spirit of these nighttime expeditions lives on. Though climbing the trees is not quite what he has in mind, Cross, the landscape manager, is a big advocate of people getting up close with campus nature. He encourages students to walk on the grass, to find secret hideouts beneath the rhododendrons, to fasten slacklines and hammocks between the trees (taking care, of course, to protect the trunks with padding). Again and again as I spoke with the self-described plantsmen on campus, they called campus a “living laboratory.” It seemed obvious — in fact, fundamental to the promise of a land-grant university — that the grounds would function as an extension of the classroom itself. In 2023, around the time that the arboretum was coming into being, I signed up for Swingle and Forsman’s tree-climbing class. In the spirit of the living laboratory, most students were there to advance their research — studying marbled murrelets, for example, or forest pathology and mycology. I was, too, in that I had a grandiose vision of being like Richard Preston, climbing redwoods for The New Yorker, but I had some obvious limitations, like how I was terrified of heights. Week after week, we practiced climbing techniques, rain or shine. We spur-climbed Douglas-firs in Peavy Arboretum. Near the end of the term, we climbed a pair of oldgrowth trees on Marys Peak, topping out around 170 feet above the forest floor — so high that the trees swayed gently in the wind as we clung to them like birds on a reed. I saw a link between this kind of interaction with the campus and the demands of the ArbNet accreditation. Institutions are required to offer a certain amount of public programming, in a sense generating interactions between people and place. It wasn’t always strictly physical. Blanchard worked with a horticulture therapy certificate student, Susannah Prenoveau, to establish a campus nature club and enroll Oregon State in Campus Nature Rx, a network of universities that use green spaces on campus to promote mental health. Prenoveau cited a litany of benefits to spending time outdoors: improved gut health, lower blood pressure, social and emotional wellness. “If you spend any time in nature, or outside,” Prenoveau said, “most people say they feel better.” Research from the College of Forestry’s HEAL Lab supports this theory: A 2021 survey found that people who maintained or increased their time outdoors during the COVID-19 pandemic were more likely to report higher levels of wellbeing. Next spring, OSU will break ground on a new healing garden in an unused quadrant behind Wiegand Hall, making it one of only a small number of universities in the country with such a facility. The campus environment doesn’t only have individual benefits, though. The horticulture department maintains close ties to the Oregon nursery industry, Contreras told me. The grounds crew is constantly introducing new plants to the campus collection — adding to its diversity and, in the process, increasing its resilience to disease, drought, heat. Forestry researchers have also been studying assisted migration — the intentional planting of trees outside of their native range as the climate grows warmer and more unpredictable. The trees are helping us prepare for the future, whatever it might look like. And each time I spoke with a plantsman, I asked how working with trees affected their sense of time. “Trees tie you to the past,” Slifkin said. They appeared permanent, immovable; students cycled through campus, every year arriving and departing, while the trees stayed put. But their lives inched forward, too, each year stacking another ring, each year stretching closer to the sun, getting a little closer to producing a new cone, offering a fresh fruit for a student to pick, almost without thought, on their way to class, a silent tether between the human and nonhuman worlds.
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